‘Unless, of course, he wanted to be caught,’ suggested Blanchaille.
‘It makes no sense. But you know Roberto, and you know his way of thinking. Jesus, he must have wanted to be caught! There is no other explanation. He let it be known in London, in certain quarters, that he was going home — knowing the details would get back to us. They did. We even knew his seat number on the aircraft.’ Van Vuuren unlocked the door and drew Blanchaille into the cell.
Zandrotti had always gone his own way, opposed not merely to the Regime but to every authority he encountered. His schemes for that opposition were novel, intriguing, entirely characteristic, quirkish, outrageous, quite impractical and wonderfully diverting. Zandrotti’s plan for immediate revolution was a message, passed by word of mouth to all those opposed to the Regime, that on a particular day at a particular time each man, woman and child would fetch a stone, the biggest and heaviest that could be carried, and place it in the middle of the road and then go home and wait for the country to grind to a halt. Zandrotti’s grand coup at school had been the occasion when he broke into the cadet armoury and stole a supply of.303 rifles and full sets of uniforms, khaki shorts and shirts, boots and puttees and caps, with which he dressed and armed a platoon of black school cleaners and drilled them on the school playground for all the world to see. The sight of black men marching with rifles caused panic in the neighbourhood. Zandrotti was expelled from the Hostel and they remembered how he was driven away in Father Cradley’s grey DKW, sitting in the back fervently making the Sign of the Cross. The rector was a notoriously bad driver and they watched Zandrotti’s mock gibbers of terror, helpless with laughter.
His star appearance was in the dock at the Kipsel trial. The trial of the so-called Fanatical Five. It wasn’t Five for long. Looksmart Dladla had fled, mysteriously warned a few days previously by an unknown source. That left just four: Kipsel, Mickey the Poet, Magdalena and Zandrotti.
The number was further reduced when Mickey the Poet hanged himself in his cell. What a miracle of athletic agility that had been, what a wonder of tenacity! Michael Yates, little Mickey the Poet, short, blond, barrel-chested, the build of a youthful welter-weight with powerful forearms and lengthy reach (which perhaps helped in the miracle of his death). But Mickey wasn’t a boxer, he was a poet, not by practice but by acclamation. He was known for four quite hopeless lines: Bourgeois, bourgeois, bourgeois fool/ Little capitalistic tool/ What you ask, will end white rule?/ Ask the children in the school! With these few lines of thudding doggerel Mickey acquired the sobriquet ‘the Poet’, and met his end. For not very long after that came the township disturbances when the school-children rioted and Mickey’s words seemed amazingly prophetic, if not a straight case of incitement, and his little poem was printed in an anthology of revolutionary verse and was much quoted abroad. And then there was the photograph of Mickey with the ‘Liberation Committee’, as the leaders of what later became the Azanian Liberation Front were known. A famous photograph showing Mickey standing between Athol Ngogi and Horatio Vilakaze, and with Achmed Witbooi, Oscar Amandla and Ramsamy Gopak, all raising clenched fists and singing. Mickey said he had gone to the meeting by mistake, someone had told him it was a jazz concert, that he never knew. He never knew. Another brief epitaph for his gravestone. He never knew when he was approached by Kipsel for a lift what it was that Kipsel carried in the brown leather briefcase. Mickey’s ignorance was invincible and nothing that the State Prosecutor, Natie Kirschbaum, said could pierce it. With wonderful simplicity Mickey informed the judge that since he hadn’t the first idea of why he had been arrested but since the prosecution seemed to have a number of explanations, he planned to call the entire prosecution team as witnesses for the defence and to cross-examine them carefully on all aspects of his case. The surprised judge adjourned the hearing to consider the application and promised a decision the following day. It caused a sensation. POET TAKES ON PROSECUTION! the headlines read.
The next day never came for Mickey the Poet. Some time during the following twenty-four hours Mickey had attached a strip of towel to his bedstead and the other around his neck and strangled himself. The incredulity with which this was greeted stopped the trial while evidence was heard of Mickey’s last hours. The shock of his death was only surpassed by the wonder of its achievement. The defence lawyers produced a statement in which Mickey complained of electric shocks, beatings, and frequent threats that he would be thrown from a high window in Balthazar Buildings. Mickey, it seemed, had demanded to see, as was his right, the Inspector of Detainees, but this had not happened. He had then, it was alleged, gone to bed, tied the towel around his neck and choked himself. Sergeant Betty Paine was called to the witness box to explain why the Inspector had not called. Sergeant Paine’s job was to take down statements from prisoners when they complained that they had been tortured and, as she added charmingly with a little flick of her blonde head, to hand this to the interrogator so that he might determine whether indeed there was a case for reporting the complaint to the Inspector of Detainees. However, when the Inspector arrived he was told by Sergeant Paine that the prisoner, Michael Yates, was ‘out’. The judge was puzzled by this and asked for the meaning of the word ‘out’. Did Sergeant Paine mean ‘out’ as in ‘out for the count,’ or ‘out for lunch’, or ‘out of order’? Or perhaps ‘out like a light’? Presumably she did not mean ‘out to tea’ or ‘out on the town’. There was laughter in court at this and the judge threatened to clear the galleries.
Sergeant Paine replied that political prisoners were the responsibility of the Security Police who were interrogating them. The police held the keys to the cell and entrance was by permission only, one could not simply go barging into a detainee’s cell unannounced or uninvited at any old hour of the night, and although it was true that the officer in charge had given permission for the Inspector of Detainees to call on Yates, as it happened she did not have the keys that night and there was nothing she could do. Rather than hurt the Inspector’s feelings she had told him that Yates was ‘out’. Sergeant Paine told the court that she dreaded such requests and did her best to please, she even kept a sign on her desk which read: ‘Please don’t ask to see the prisoners as a refusal may offend…’ Well, the judge enquired, if the Inspector of Detainees had not seen the prisoner, then presumably Paine had done so, since she had taken down his statement on her Brother electric typewriter. Did he strike her as someone who had been assaulted by interrogating officers? She gave a rather flustered glance desperately towards what were known as the choir stalls, the front benches of the court where the prosecution witnesses from the police sat. A security branch man was shaking his head vigorously at her. The defence counsel protested, claiming that the witness was being prompted from the wings. Sergeant Paine shrilly denied the charge and burst into tears and the judge cautioned the defence for hectoring the witness and permitted her to step down.
And that was the end of the inquiry into the strange death of Mickey the Poet.
The next day Kipsel turned state witness and gave his evidence in a hoarse whisper. He took all the blame on himself: he had persuaded Mickey the Poet to drive him, it was his uncle who ran the compound where the explosive store was situated, it was he who persuaded Looksmart to draw the map of the township and it was through her love for him that Magdalena had allowed herself to be persuaded to take part in the operation. And Zandrotti? Why, he hadn’t really been involved at all, he’d merely winked, smiled and sang a couple of verses of the National Anthem.
Kipsel was given a suspended sentence and discharged.
While he was giving evidence to a hushed courtroom, Magdalena turned her back on him and Zandrotti shouted angrily that he should keep his explanations to himself, better a bungling saboteur than a traitor. For this he was removed to the cells beneath the court room.